The servants knew very well what the count meant when he said, “Drive fast!” The coachman, on such occasions, made his horses literally go as fast as they could; and, but for his great skill, the foot-passengers would have been in considerable danger. Nevertheless, on this evening Count Ville-Handry twice lowered the window to call out,--
“Don’t drive at a walk!”
The fact is, that, in spite of his efforts to assume the air of a grave statesman, he was as impatient, and as vain of his love, as a young collegian hurrying to his first rendezvous with his beloved. During dinner he had been sullen and silent; now he became talkative, and chatted away, without troubling himself about the silence of his companion.
To be sure, Daniel did not even listen. Half-buried in the corner of the well-padded carriage, he tried his best to control his emotions; for he was excited, more excited than ever in his life, by the thought that he was to see, face to face, this formidable adventuress, Miss Brandon. And like the wrestler, who, before making a decisive assault, gathers up all his strength, he summoned to his aid his composure and his energy. It took them not more than ten minutes to drive the whole distance to Circus Street.
“Here we are!” cried the count.
And, without waiting for the steps to be let down, he jumped on the sidewalk, and, running ahead of his servants, knocked at the door of Miss Brandon’s house. It was by no means one of those modern structures which attract the eye of the passer-by by a ridiculous and conspicuous splendor. Looking at it from the street, you would have taken it for the modest house of a retired grocer, who was living in it upon his savings at the rate of two or three thousand a year. It is true, that from the street, you could see neither the garden, nor the stables and the carriage-houses.
In the meantime a servant had appeared, who took the count’s and Daniel’s coats, and showed them up stairs. When they reached the upper landing, the count stopped, as if his breath had been giving out of a sudden.
“There,” he stammered, “there!”
“Where? What?” Daniel did not know what he meant. The count only wished to say that “there” was the place where he had held Miss Brandon in his arms the day she had fainted. But Daniel had no time to ask any questions. Another servant appeared, coming out of the rooms, and, bowing low before Count Ville-Handry, he said,--
“The ladies have but just risen from table, and are still dressing.”
“Ah!”
“If the gentlemen will please sit down in the parlor, I will tell M. Elgin.”
“Very well,” said the count, speaking in a tone which showed that he considered himself perfectly at home in Miss Brandon’s house. He entered the parlor, followed by Daniel. It was a magnificent room; but every thing in it, from the carpet on the floor to the chandelier on the ceiling, betrayed the Puritanic taste of Mrs. Brian. It was splendid; but the splendor was cold, stiff, and mournful. The furniture had sharp angles, and suggested any thing but comfort. The bronze figures on the mantlepiece-clock were biblical personages; and the other bronzes were simply hideous. Except these, there was no ornament visible, not a painting, nor a statuette.
Yes, one. Opposite the fireplace, in the place of honor, there stared at you a painting in a most costly gilt frame,--a horrible daub, representing a man of about fifty years, who wore a fancy uniform with enormous epaulets, a huge sword, a plumed hat, and a blue sash, into which two revolvers were thrust.
“Gen. Brandon, Miss Sarah’s father,” said Count Ville-Handry, in a tone of deep respect, which unnerved Daniel. “As a work of art, this portrait leaves, no doubt, much to be wished for; but they say the likeness is excellent.”
Certainly, though that might be so, there was no resemblance to be discovered between the tanned face of this American general and the blooming features of Miss Brandon. But there was something more. As Daniel examined this picture nearer by, and more closely, he thought he discovered a studied and intentional coarseness of execution. It looked to him like the work of an artist who had endeavored to imitate those wretched painters who live upon the vanity of weak men and little children. He thought he discovered by the side of gross inaccuracies unmistakable traces of a master’s hand; and especially one of the ears, half hid behind the hair, seemed to him admirably done.
But, before he could draw his conclusions from this strange discovery, M. Thomas Elgin appeared in the room. He was in evening costume, looking taller and stiffer than ever in his white cravat; and, as he came forward, he halted a little on one foot, though leaning upon a big cane.
“What, my dear Sir Thorn!” exclaimed the count, “your leg still gives you trouble?”
“Oh, a great deal!” replied the honorable gentleman, with a very marked English accent,--“a great deal since this morning. The doctor thinks there must be something the matter with the bone.”
At the same time, obeying the tendency which we all have to display our ailments, he slightly drew up his trousers, so that the bandages became visible which he wore around his leg. Count Ville-Handry looked at it with pity; then, forgetting that he had introduced Daniel already the night before at the opera, he presented him once more; and, when the ceremony was over, he said to Sir Thorn,--
“Upon my word, I am almost ashamed to appear so early; but I knew you expected company to-night.”
“Oh, only a few persons!”
“And I desired to see you for a few moments alone.”
A strange grimace represented the only smile of which the honorable gentleman was capable. He made it twice, and then said, caressing his primly-cut whiskers,--
“They have told Miss Sarah that you are here, my dear count; and I heard her tell Mrs. Brian that she was nearly ready. I cannot imagine how she can spend so much time at her toilet.”
They were thus chatting away before the fireplace, Sir Thorn stretched out in an easy-chair, and the count leaning against the mantlepiece, while Daniel had withdrawn into the embrasure of a window which looked upon the court-yard and the garden behind the house. There, his brow pressed against the cool window-panes, he was meditating. He could not understand this wound of M. Elgin’s.
“Is it possible that his fall was an intentional fall?” he thought, “or did he really break his leg? If he did so, that fainting-fit might have been natural, and not prearranged; but”--
He was just plunging into these doubts and speculations, when the noise of a carriage entering the court-yard, aroused him from his thoughts.
He looked out. A coupe had driven up to the back porch of the house. A lady stepped out; and he was on the point of uttering a cry of surprise, for he thought he recognized Miss Sarah in that woman. But could that be so? He was unwilling to believe it, when she suddenly raised her head in order to speak to the coachman, and the light from the lamps fell full upon her face.
There was no doubt now on his mind. It was Miss Brandon.
She flew up the steps, and entered the house. He heard distinctly the heavy door close behind her.
At the opera, the night before, a single word uttered by Miss Brandon had sufficed to enlighten Daniel. But now this was a very different matter. It was a potent fact, unmistakable and tangible, which came to him in support of his suspicions.
In order to increase the passionate impatience of the count, they had told him that Miss Brandon was still dressing, but that she was making all haste to come down to him. Not a word had been said of her being out, and of her return at that very moment. Where had she been? What new intrigues had compelled her to leave the house just then? It must have evidently been something of great importance to have kept her out till so late an hour, and when she knew, moreover, that the count was waiting for her.
This incident threw a flood of light on the cunning policy pursued in this house, and on the clever and active complicity of M. Thomas Elgin and Mrs. Brian. What their game really was, and how Count Ville-Handry had been caught in the trap, he now understood well enough; he would have been caught in it himself.
How clever these actors were! how perfect all the arrangements! and how scientifically the smallest details were prepared! How marvellously well even the parlor was arranged to serve the purposes of the owners! This simple elegance could not but banish all doubts; and this horrible portrait of the so-called Gen. Brandon--what a stroke of genius!
As to the lame leg of Sir Thorn, Daniel no longer believed in it.
“His leg is no more broken than mine,” he thought.
But at the same time he marvelled at the self-denial of this gentleman, who, in order to prove a falsehood, consented to wear his leg bandaged up for months, as if it really had been severely injured.
“And to-night,” said Daniel to himself, “the performance, no doubt, is to be specially artistic, as they expected me.”
Still, like a duellist, who tries to regain all his strength after a sleepless night, Daniel was now fully prepared for the battle. He even returned to the fireplace, for fear that his standing alone, and his preoccupation, might betray his thoughts.
The conversation between Count Ville-Handry and M. Elgin had in the meantime become very familiar; and the count was just detailing all his arrangements for the approaching wedding. He would live, he said, with his wife in the second story of his palace. The first story was to be divided into two suites of apartments,--one for M. Thomas Elgin, and the other for Mrs. Brian; for he knew very well that his adored Sarah would never consent to part with her dear relatives, who had been father and mother to her.
The last words remained in his throat; he stood as if he were petrified, his eyes starting from their sockets, his mouth wide open.
Mrs. Brian had entered the room, followed by Miss Brandon. Daniel was even more struck by her strange beauty to-day than at the opera; it was literally dazzling. She wore on that night a dress of tea-color embroidered with tiny bouquets in Chinese silk, and trimmed below with an immense flounce of plaited muslin. In her hair, which looked even more carelessly put up than usually, she had nothing but a branch of fuschia, the crimson bells falling gracefully down upon her neck, where they mingled with her golden curls.
She came smilingly up to Count Ville-Handry, and, offering him her brow to kiss, she said,--
“Do I look well, dear count?”
He trembled from head to foot; and all he could do was to stretch out his lips, and to stammer in an almost ecstatic tone of voice,--
“Oh, beautiful! too beautiful!”
“It has taken you long enough, I am sure,” said Sir Thorn severely,--“too long!”
He might have known that Miss Brandon had accomplished a miracle of expeditiousness; for it was not a quarter of an hour since she returned to the house.
“You are an impertinent villain, Thorn,” she said, laughing in the fresh and hearty manner of a child; “and I am very happy that the presence of the count relieves me from your eternal sermons.”
“Sarah!” exclaimed Mrs. Brian reprovingly.
But she had already turned round, with her hand outstretched towards Daniel,--
“I am so glad you have come, sir!” she said. “I am sure we shall understand each other admirably.”
She told him this with the softest possible voice; but, if he had known her better, he would have read in the way in which she looked at him, that her disposition towards him had entirely changed since yesterday; then she wished him well; now she hated him savagely.
“Understand each other?” he repeated as he bowed; “in what?”
She made no answer.
The servant announced some of the usual visitors; and she went to receive them. Ten o’clock struck; and from that moment the invited guests did not cease to arrive. At eleven o’clock there were perhaps a hundred persons in the room; and in the two adjoining rooms card-tables had been arranged.
It appeared that the gentlemen who showed themselves there--old men mostly, amply decorated with foreign orders, and young men in extravagantly fashionable costumes--were not free from suspicion; but they all belonged to Paris high-life, to that society, which, under a dazzlingly brilliant outside, conceals hideous crimes, and allows now and then traces of real misery to be seen through the rents in the splendid livery worn by its members.
Some of these men stood, by the name they bore or the position they filled, high above the rest of the company; they were easily recognized by their haughty manner, and the intense deference with which their slightest remarks were received. And to this crowd Count Ville-Handry displayed his good-fortune. He assumed all the airs of the master of the house; as if he had been in his own house, gave orders to the servants, and then, with mock modesty, went from group to group, eagerly picking up all the compliments he could gather on Miss Brandon’s beauty, and his own good luck.
Gracefully reclining in an easy-chair near the fireplace, Miss Sarah looked a young queen surrounded by her court. But in spite of the multitude of her admirers, and the number of compliments she received at every moment, she never for a moment lost sight of Daniel, watching him all the time stealthily, to read his thoughts in his features.
Once she even shocked the crowd of her worshippers by suddenly leaving her place in order to ask him why he held himself so aloof, and whether he felt indisposed. Then, seeing that he was a perfect stranger here, she was good enough to point out to him some of the most remarkable men in the crowd. In doing this, she was so anxious to make him aware of her distinguished friends, that Daniel began to think she must have divined his intentions, and thus indirectly defied him, as if she had said in so many words,--
“You see what friends I have, and how they would defend me if you should dare to attack me.”
Nevertheless, he was not discouraged, being fully aware of all the difficulties of his undertaking, and having long since counted up all the obstacles in his way. While the conversation was going on around him, he arranged in his head a plan, which, he hoped, would enable him to find out the antecedents of this dangerous adventuress.
These thoughts preoccupied him to such a degree, that he did not become aware how the rooms became gradually empty. It was so, nevertheless; and there were finally only a few intimate friends left, and four players at a card-table.
Then Miss Brandon arose, and, coming up to Daniel, said to him,--
“Will you grant me ten minutes’ conversation, sir?”
He prepared to follow her, when Mrs. Brian interposed, saying a few words in a tone of reproach to her niece. Daniel knew enough English to understand that she said,--
“What you are doing is highly improper, Sarah.”
“Shocking!” added M. Thomas Elgin.
But she shrugged her shoulders slightly, and replied in English,--
“My dear count alone would have a right to judge my conduct; and he has authorized me to do what I am doing.”
Then turning to Daniel, she said to him in French,--
